27 people injured by elderly man driving a car through a crowd

These headline always strike me as a little wierd in that it seems to imply that the car did this on its own. Two of these 27 people from this tragedy are apparently in very serious condition and it is not yet clear what will happen with them. It is ironic that the article has an advertisement for "AARP Auto Insurance," but there is no discussion in the article about allowing elderly people to drive. It seems to me that several of these cases recently involve older drivers. One exception was the case in North Carolina where a Muslim used his SUV to attack non-Muslims. In any case, could one imagine the news coverage if a gun had been used to wound 27 people?

Even if you are talking about only 10 percent or so of Obrador's supporters who believe that there is fraud and the election should be challenged (about the number that I saw in a recent poll), that is still millions of people.

7/03/2006

Rankings of economists

For whatever it is worth, there are recent rankings of economists. The rankings examines economists from 1969 to 2000. There are four UCLA Ph.D.'s noted on the list: Ross Levine, Guido Tabellini, Bob Topel, and myself. Personally, I am honored to even be roughly on the same list as these three guys. Based on that ranking in terms of total academic journal output adjusted for quality of the journals I am ranked during that period of time as 26th (obviously I didn't get my Ph.D. until 1984 so that works to lower my rating relative to older economists, still I am surprisingly ahead of older well-known economists such as Robert Barro (Harvard), Ed Lazear (Stanford), and Peter Diamond (MIT) (see Table 8)). In terms of raw number of equivalent size pages in academic journals, I am 4th among all economists worldwide. Based upon citations during the 1969 to 2000 period I am 86th (putting me slightly ahead of older people such as John Roberts (Stanford), Ben Bernanke (Princeton, now head of the Federal Reserve), and Oliver Hart (MIT) (see Table 9)).